How rude. This breaking out of your comfort zone thing is really driving you up the wall.

Well, the problem with retirement is retirement itself is pretty stressful. Logically maybe yes, maybe no, but subconsciously it certainly is. Many of my fellow workers at the office who are leaving along with me are younger and they're, of course, faced with the reality of finding another job (to pay the mortgage, to pay the kids' tuition, to put the food on the table and to keep their spouses from freaking out) which is (I assume) is even more stressful than retirement.

So I'm dealing with stress during a time when friends, who are dealing with stress, are telling me I need to get out of my comfort zone; saying this, I'm guessing, a product of their own stressful situation. Shit. I'm out of my comfort zone until the end of the month and then I expect to get up in the morning relaxed and ready for whatever comes. Everybody I know looks ten years younger the day after they retire. I'd say the morning after, but I haven't seen any of them the morning after being encumbered with the need to stumble into the office.

There have been more people given notice they've been extended, by the way. Gives me the willies. Some have been told on the day they were scheduled to leave. I've got this damned project I've got to get finished or they might - you never can tell with these people - extend me as well. I think I'm safe, I think I'm home free, but my thinking has nothing to do with their thinking, if they think at all. Not hard to see where Dilbert comes from, where Scott Adams spent his early years while he was scribbling out those first panels of his comic strip.